Conard County Marine by Rachel Lee Page A

had once been, seldom down about anything unless it was a patient she couldn’t do much to help. Everything else, though...well, she’d been a little like a cork, always bobbing up again.
    She hadn’t been like that since she woke up in the hospital and she didn’t much like this new, darker, frightened version of herself.
    The contrast to Kylie before disturbed her deeply. She wanted that person back, and hoped the new Kylie wasn’t a result of the brain damage. Because there had been brain damage.
    After the show was over and she cleaned up the popcorn bowls, she returned to sit with Coop. “I must bore you,” she said.
    His blue eyes widened a shade. “Not at all. Never.”
    “Well, I bore myself. I don’t even like myself anymore. Did Glenda tell you I had brain damage?”
    “I don’t think so. You don’t seem like it.”
    “Well, it’s part of the reason I lost my memory. Now I’m wondering if I lost my personality along with it.”
    “I’m not the one to answer that, but I don’t see anything wrong with who you are now. You’re recovering from a severe trauma, but the flashes still come through of a Kylie who enjoyed life, who laughed easily. Trust yourself.”
    She sighed, propping her chin on her hand. “I guess it’s all I can do. I sure can’t change anything.”
    “For a fact.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his large hands. “I was stationed for a year in Okinawa. There was a Go master near the base and I went to him for instruction. Do you know what Go is?”
    “A game?”
    “Right. You move colored stones around the board, and the goal is to capture swaths of territory on the board. A strategy game. The details don’t matter. What matters is what my sensei said to me. I asked him if I’d made the right move at one point and he looked at me and said, ‘Right move, wrong move, all is next move.’ I thought about that for a long time, but he was right. It’s all about the next move, Kylie.”
    All is next move. The phrase glued itself to her brain, and she pondered it. She couldn’t go back in time. She couldn’t change anything that had already happened. So it made sense that what mattered was the next move.
    Grieving for a woman who was no more—and she couldn’t really be sure of that, given how recent her trauma had been—might be necessary, but it wasn’t very useful.
    In fact, trying to reach that woman only made her feel worse, and enough had happened that was bad. She didn’t need to add to it with her own resentment and self-pity.
    Bad enough that she couldn’t shake the fear that haunted her, as if the demon that had attacked her would once again emerge from the darkness to finish the job.
    Coop had already told her that it might be a while before she shook the fear. He ought to know—he’d been in a lot more deadly situations than she had.
    Words popped out again, that new distressing tendency of hers. “Do you feel afraid walking down the streets?”
    He looked up from studying his hands or the floor or whatever. “Yeah. Sometimes. It gets easier, but I think I told you. There are situations where my skin crawls, anyway.”
    She bit her lip. “The whole night frightens me. And look what happened when we took that walk. I was scared the whole time with the feeling that somebody was watching. Of course someone was watching. Probably a dozen people looked out their windows or around the corners of their houses as they walked their dogs. It was ridiculous. But you were so nice about it.”
    “Because I don’t think it’s ridiculous,” he said firmly. He wasn’t about to tell her that he’d felt they had been stalked. It would only scare her more, and for all he knew it was just some ambling idiot who was curious. Being watched was not necessarily a threat. “I told you, we feel it when someone watches us. Instinct.”
    “But it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
    “No,” he agreed, hoping he wasn’t misleading